Boulevard of Broken Dreams
by lizardwriter
Summary: It's Effy's first night out of the mental hospital  take 2 , and she can't sleep so she goes for a walk with her thoughts.  This is just a oneshot.  Please read and review! Disclaimer:  I don't own Skins or the characters.


**A/N: Lyrics and title taken from the Green Day song "Boulevard of Broken Dreams". Apparently I'm on an Effy kick or something, but this popped into my head last night, so decided to go ahead and write it. It deals with mental illness again, kinda. I hope you like it. This is for HyperFitched for writing such brilliant Keffy in 99 Problems (that you all need to go read if you haven't already).**

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_I walk this empty street  
On the Boulevard of Broken Dreams  
Where the city sleeps  
and I'm the only one and I walk alone_

..

The night air is cool as it hits my skin. November in Bristol will do that to a person. I've almost forgotten what it's like to have the freedom to do something like take a walk alone. The empty city streets echo my footsteps back at me. It seems like everyone else in the entire city is already asleep, tucked safely away in their beds. At half three, I don't blame them. I tried that, but sleep eluded me.

My first night out of the funny farm and I couldn't fucking adjust to the silence of my own flat. Two and a half years of in-patient treatment, and it seems I've forgotten how quiet and lonely the real world can be at times. There're no bed checks in the middle of the night out here. No hello's from John whenever he's on duty, no matter the time. No constant echo of footsteps down the hallway, no murmurings of nurses just outside my room, and no faint snoring from my roommate, tucked snugly in her bed (not that I ever really got used to that, since I only had a roommate for the last six months and we didn't exactly bond).

It doesn't help that my flat just feels empty. I know my mum tried to fill it with things, but that doesn't change how foreign the place feels. She'd even stuck Pato on the bed for me, but, as nice as it was seeing him there, I'm past the point when stuffed animals can offer me comfort. She's put pictures on the walls, as well, or family and friends I used to have (with one whose absence is glaring). Not seeing Freddie in pictures on my wall won't make me not think about him, so the first thing I did this afternoon was fix that. He now has a framed picture sitting on the end table by the couch next to the one of me and Katie from a few weeks ago, her latest visit to me.

A brand new medicine schedule is mounted to one wall with helpful "inspirational" quotes written along the border. No doubt a suggestion from the always bouncy and far too cheerful Nurse Louise.

Much as my mum tried to make the flat a home, I just can't feel it, and you can't force what you can't feel, or so I've been told by people with advanced degrees. It doesn't feel like home, and I honestly can't see it ever doing so.

It doesn't help that my mum's in the flat upstairs, suffocatingly close. Her idea of trying to honour my request for independence in my post-mental hospital life. I suppose I should be happy. She'd wanted us to get a flat together. I know she's only close out of concern. This way she can check on me whenever she likes. Let's hope she doesn't decide on now, or she'll have a panic attack finding my flat empty. I'm betting she's asleep, though. There'd been no footsteps above my head for hours when I eventually gave up on sleep and ventured out into this empty, eerily still night.

..

_I'm walking down the line  
That divides me somewhere in my mind  
On the border line  
Of the edge and where I walk alone_

..

I find myself walking along the curb, walking it like a balance beam, sticking my arms out to the side for balance like I did when I was a kid.

As I stumble and resort to walking normally along the squares of the pavement, I can't help thinking back to the last times I walked these city streets. Somehow my past always filters back, and I've learned that that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's much worse to forget it completely, no matter the pain that the memories dredge up.

Somehow, tonight, the memories make me feel less alone as I trudge down one empty street after another.

I remember Pandora, nattering away in that way that was so uniquely her and made so very little sense, but always managed to make me laugh.

I remember walking along with Naomi and Emily, catching their fingers intertwining as their bodies shifted impossibly closer as if they were drawn to each other by some gravitational pull the rest of us couldn't feel.

I remember passing a smoke back and forth with just Naomi, the occasional sarcastic or caustic remark slipping from her lips with a smirk, hiding with words the vulnerability and sensitivity within.

I remember walking partway home with Katie after I gave her her first smoking lesson, comfortable silence stretching between us until she glanced sheepishly at me and we broke into laughter for no apparent reason.

I remember Freddie. His laughter, his kisses, his stupid doped up smile.

I remember, too, how that was stolen from me and from the world, much too soon. My fault, or so I'd thought for the better part of a year before I realised that blaming myself wouldn't bring him back. To quote Katie, "You aren't the fucking psychopathic supposed doctor with a fucking baseball bat, now, are you?"

I hadn't been able to even crack a smile at the time, but her words had still managed to strike a nerve. She was the first of my "friends" to visit in the hospital, and the only one, in the end, who had any staying power.

That's probably an unfair statement. I know Naomi and Emily would have visited more if it wasn't such a trip down from Edinburgh. Just as well, really. There's only so much happiness I can take thrust in my face at one time. Even if I'm not necessarily unhappy at the moment, with them it's simply love overload.

I was initially worried about seeing anybody, convinced that they would all blame me. In the end only Karen attempted to, and she relented in time. I held on to my guilt long after she forgave me. As Katie would say, "Thank fuck for therapy, right babes?"

She'd know, too. She went through some counselling of her own. It was part of what brought her round so frequently at the beginning of my stay. I honestly don't know what kept her coming back regularly after that, but she did. She always visited. Even for the six months I didn't speak at all. It worked well because she spoke enough for the both of us most of the time, and the times that she didn't we'd sit in comfortable silence. I don't know why, but I think she's the only one who even sort of understood my second breakdown.

Poor Pandora, she couldn't handle it at all. It turned out to be good that she was going away to America, because she needed to get away. I never saw her with dry eyes in the weeks before she left, only red, puffy ones. She'd write from time to time, and, from what I can tell, she's thriving in America. Her brand of insanity and nonsense apparently fits in well with theirs. Thomas apparently has found his way over there as well.

JJ tried visiting me, but God knows he had his own issues to deal with, and seeing me just proved too hard in the end.

Cook...Well, Cook would have visited. Probably will some day. When his sentence is up. Katie would bring me messages from him from time to time. Seems he's trying to take a fresh perspective on life. One that will hopefully prove less self-destructive. We could all stand to be a little less self-destructive.

And Freddie...I think maybe he visits me in spirit. I guess now I'm out it's my turn to visit him. I'm sure my mum will argue for a bit, not wanting me to do anything that could send me back, but I can't hide from his memory, and I want to visit his grave. I never really got to properly. I never got to visit with a clear head. My mind had already slipped far too far away by the funeral.

I didn't even get to go home after it, not that the house I'd grown up in even felt like a home anymore by then. I just went straight to the hospital, bundled in the back of Mum's car in a blanket, Tony's strong arms wrapped around me, and empty promises that everything would be all right whispered into my ear.

I remember tears streamed down my face, but I couldn't fathom why because I wasn't even really there. Not even a little. It was weeks before I even began to come back to myself, and much longer before I started to deal with everything that had happened, to sort through the pain, to become anything beyond a hollow shell whose mind had left it.

..

_My shadow's the only one that walks beside me  
My shallow heart's the only thing that's beating  
Sometimes I wish someone out there will find me  
'Til then I walk alone_

..

I pull my jacket tighter around me as the wind picks up. My eyes watch the ground as one foot falls in front of another. It's an almost comforting rhythm as my Vans slap along the pavement, matching the pounding of my heart. I let my feet travel where they will, my shadow occasionally joining me as company when I walk under a streetlight. It's a little foreign to look at. I'm not used to seeing it with my hair shorter. Katie had insisted that a new hair style would make me feel better so had cut it on her last visit.

She'd also offered to come pick me up when I got out, but I'd turned her down. It'd be different with me out here, in the real world. I didn't want to drag her down or hold her back. She's got her own life, working hard co-managing her mum's wedding planning business. I don't need to insert myself in it. Business is doing well, last I heard. So well she'd bought her own flat a few months back. She'd excitedly described it to me in detail. It had been nice seeing her so happy. I don't want to take away from that happiness. What if I reverted back?

She'll insist on seeing me, I'm sure, but I don't want to impose on her just because she's the only one still around these days.

It's strange how our friendship developed. On the surface we're so different. It's not until we bothered to dig deeper that we bonded. It's funny, but it almost feels like Katie's visits are as responsible for getting me sane as the medications and the doctor's treatments. She was my one true link to the outside world. My mum tried, but she hovered too much, her worry always showing through, tainting our conversations. It was suffocating at times.

I walk on, breathing in the cool night air, shivering occasionally against the cold. I really should have dressed warmer, but warmth wasn't my main concern when I'd left the flat. I wanted to feel free. Or at home. Or maybe both. Either way, neither was happening at my flat. The new, foreign place that so far felt like just as much of a prison as the walls of my room at the hospital had.

Still, I'm out now, I remind myself. I have the liberty to take a walk in the middle of the night if I so choose. I've got responsibilities again too. Ones that go beyond remembering to take my medications at the right time (the red pill first thing in the morning and again at four in the afternoon, the white pill in the morning, at noon, and again before bed, and the blue one once a day with a meal). I begin my job hunt tomorrow, though who knows who'll hire a crazy person, even a reformed one. It's hardly like I've gotten any job experience in the last two years, and being in the loony bin makes going to uni at the same time a bit difficult. Sure, I've read just about any book I could get my hands on (including mostly more than anyone's fair share of psychology texts and journals), but they don't give out degrees for that, and I'm not sure a drug and sex fuelled university setting is the best thing for me right now. For now I'll stay close to home, in Bristol, with my mum two doors down, and attempt to join the ranks of the gainfully employed.

I finally look up, just to check my bearings, and I stop in my tracks when I realise where my feet have lead me. I shake my head at myself with a small smirk gracing my features. Apparently some of my resolutions are already being broken.

I take in the building in front of me. It's exactly as she'd described it: dark blue door with an elegant glass inset, standard brick construction, perfectly groomed low hedges, grey mini in the driveway, flowerbox in the window. If I remember correctly her place is the one on the bottom left, I contemplate approaching the buzzer to see which one reads her name. It's almost four now, though, and this is hardly not imposing. I should turn around and leave, go home and try to get some sleep. I should trace my way back through the empty streets of this sleeping city.

I want to. I mean to. I'm about to turn, when the blue door swings open, and she's standing there with a smirk on her beautiful face (no makeup on, I notice), clad in jeans and a cute grey sweater.

"Hey," she greets.

"Hey," I reply, and she gives me one of her beautiful, genuine smiles, the kind that I didn't see for months after Gobbler's End and then almost a year after Freddie's death. The kind that warms your insides just from its sincerity.

"You want to come in?" she invites.

I shake my head. "I should probably go." I should, but my feet don't seem to be moving anywhere.

"It's the middle of the night, Effy. Where're you gonna go?" She gives me another smile, this one more amused. She's clearly aware that this is an argument she's going to win.

I look from side to side, seeing the empty, lonely street stretching out in either direction. It's not very inviting. I look back at her. "So what were you doing awake, then, Katie?"

She grins broadly at me then, another genuine smile. "Come in for a cuppa and I'll tell you." She stands back inviting me in.

I relent, just like we both knew I would, and I follow her inside.

As the door closes behind us, I take the first deep, easy breath that I've taken in years, and I smile a wide, genuine smile. I just got here, but already it feels like home.


End file.
